Subject: Delay-Tolerant Networking Research Group

From: Vern Paxson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 10:21:05 -0400

A new IRTF research group, DTNRG (Delay-Tolerant Networking Research Group),
has begun, with the appended charter.  See

        http://www.irtf.org/charters/dtnrg.html

for how to subscribe to the mailing list and for further information.

- Vern Paxson  (IRTF chair)

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The Delay-Tolerant Networking Research Group (DTNRG) is chartered to address
the architectural and protocol design principles arising from the need to
provide interoperable communications with and among extreme and
performance-challenged environments where continuous end-to-end connectivity
cannot be assumed. Examples of such environments include spacecraft,
military/tactical, some forms of disaster response, underwater, and some
forms of ad-hoc sensor/actuator networks.

Among the challenges to be addressed are: large delay for transmissions
resulting from either physical link properties or extended periods of
network partitioning, routing capable of operating efficiently with
frequently-disconnected, pre-scheduled, or opportunistic link availability,
high per-link error rates making end-to-end reliability difficult,
heterogeneous underlying network technologies (including non-IP-based
internets), and application structure and security mechanisms capable of
limiting network access prior to data transit in an environment where
round-trip-times may be very large.

The group intends to build upon the extended "bundling" architecture created
originally for the Interplanetary Internet.  This architecture proposes
an alternative to the Internet TCP/IP end-to-end model and employs hop-by-hop
storage and retransmission as a transport-layer overlay. It provides a
messaging service interface conceptually similar to electronic mail, but
generalized for application-independence and supported by specialized
reliability and routing capabilities.

The intended work products of the DTNRG include architectural descriptions
(concept documents) a bundling protocol specification, and a series of one
or more network-environment-specific "profile" documents. These profile
documents will include descriptions of 'convergence layers' intended to
adapt the overlying messaging architecture for use in specialized networking
environments (space, water, sensor networks), and are expected to be created
by the study teams described in the Membership section below. One study
team output will be an "Internet profile" document, developed in concert
with the architectural and protocol specification documents, giving suggested
naming conventions and protocols to use for transport within the public
Internet.

Members of the DTNRG also intend to distribute source code of a reference
implementation of the architecture and protocols developed.

Membership is open to any interested parties who intend to remain current
with the published documents and mailing list issues. From time to time
the primary research group will be augmented with special study teams who
will address the use of DTN architectures and protocols in specific
networking environments.

Regular working meetings are typically held every 4-6 weeks at locations
convenient to majority of the participants.  Presentation-oriented
status/summary meetings are to be held once a year (or more frequently,
at the desire of the group) concurrent with IETF.